


The Double Bottom Line

by keerawa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Diary/Journal, Gen, Podfic Available, Season/Series 01, Sexual Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-06
Updated: 2009-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:09:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam sneaks a look at his brother's journal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Double Bottom Line

**Author's Note:**

> Set during early season 1. Thanks to [](http://dodger-winslow.livejournal.com/profile)[**dodger_winslow**](http://dodger-winslow.livejournal.com/) for the tough love beta!

Sam was digging through his brother’s duffle for a clean shirt when he found the battered Mead composition book. Its cover was a Sharpie-inked tribute to hard rock bands of the ‘70’s - Dean’s version of a pre-teen girl crushing on Justin Timberlake. Dean had been jotting notes in it since Sam was a kid, but he’d never gotten so much as a peek inside.

Sam decided to leave the notebook where he’d found it. It’s not like they had a lot of privacy, and messing with Dean’s stuff was enough to kick off a prank war.

Or, it would have been, four years ago. Now, Sam wasn’t sure, and it was freaking him out. Dean was supposed to be _Dean_. Five mix tapes, two food groups, and one lame pick-up line. Sometimes Dean seemed as familiar as Sam’s favorite hoodie. But sometimes, these days, his reactions were off, different than Sam expected, like there was a stranger in the driver’s seat. Sam woke up in the Impala the other night to find Dean speeding down an empty highway to the glorious strains of a Malmsteen solo, and it was as beautiful and _wrong_ as watching the sun rise over the Pacific.

He needed to know what Dean had been up to while Sam was attending chem lab, writing papers, and blowing the curve in Latin class. What had happened, what changed him? He couldn’t ask, not without offering memories of Stanford in return, and Sam just – he wasn’t ready for that. Dad’s journal had personal stories sandwiched in between lore on every evil thing they’d ever hunted. Maybe Dean’s did, too. Hell, given how much his brother hated talking about anything important, he might _prefer_ that Sam get his information from the journal.

Sam glanced at the bathroom door. Dean should be in the shower for at least fifteen minutes, getting that sap out of his hair. Sam pulled the notebook out from the jeans it was wrapped in, sat down on his bed, and opened the front cover.

Inside was a list of names and dates starting back when Dean was fourteen. Sam grinned down at his brother’s all-caps scrawl. Typical - Dean _would_ keep track of his conquests. Dean had always bragged that Daisy O’Connor took his cherry, but the first entry said:  
4/20/93 CAROL M (A) TX-VSP-M2

They’d spent the spring of 1993 in Galveston, so TX must be Texas. Sam spent a minute puzzling over the other codes. There were plenty of possibilities, but they all seemed a little adventurous for a fourteen year-old kid, even if that kid was Dean.

The second name in the list was a ‘Mark’. Whoa. Sam tried to imagine a sweet-faced boy sharing a cigarette with Dean under the bleachers, but the image of some skanky, balding middle-aged guy cruising the junior high playground kept intruding, which made Sam want to _hit_ something. He checked the next few pages. Well, it couldn’t have been too traumatic an experience, because nearly half of the names in this journal were men.

Jesus. Dean could have said something. Okay, yeah, Dad would have flipped. And Sam was kind of impressed that Dean had actually done it, gone against Dad’s wishes and kept it to himself for all these years. But he could have told his own brother. Sam wouldn’t have given him crap about it, wouldn’t have judged him, at least no more that he already did for all the one-night stands, and … fuck. How did he not know this about his big brother?

Sam skimmed ahead, quickly glancing over each page, looking for August of 2001. There it was. With his researcher’s eye for patterns, the differences were obvious. When Sam left for Stanford, the entries became much more frequent. The (A) code, which had grown less common over the years, disappeared entirely. Sometimes Dean was, umm, dating three or four people in a single day. Dean had said he’d started hunting alone – guess he had more opportunities that way.

More pages. More dates. More names. Sam’s stomach felt hot and tight. Dean’s notebook was almost full, and Sam’s entire sexual history would have fit on half a page.

Sam turned to a page near the end. 11/20/05 said the first entry. And the second. And the third. And every line down the rest of the page. He turned to the next page. 11/20/05. And another page. And another. Over a hundred names in one day, and that wasn’t even _possible_. He had to be missing something. Sam turned back to the first entry for that date.  
11/20/05 AMANDA W (A) IN-D-S

Amanda. Amanda? The flight attendant who survived the first United Britannica crash, her name was Amanda Walker. But Dean couldn’t have slept with her. They hadn’t even spent the night in Indianapolis, had skipped out of town after exorcising the demon that was trying to crash her plane.

The plane that had over one hundred passengers on board.

Oh.

Sam realized what he was looking at, and carefully tucked his brother’s journal back into the bottom of the duffle.

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone was wondering about the title of this piece: 
> 
> The double bottom line is a term used by socially responsible businesses. The 'bottom line' is a measure of a company's finacial profit or loss. The second bottom line measures the company's positive impact on their community.
> 
> John Winchester's journal is all about hunting things, the first measure of a hunter's success. And Dean's focuses on the second measure - the people he's saved.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The Double Bottom Line](https://archiveofourown.org/works/967437) by [miss_marina95](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_marina95/pseuds/miss_marina95)




End file.
